Donut Labs Gets $22M To Automate Trading With DeFi’s First Agentic Browser

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Donut Labs is building up momentum ahead of the official launch of what it says is the decentralized finance industry’s first agentic crypto browser. The company has just announced it has raised $22 million in funding, just six months after it formed and announced its mission to transform DeFi through agentic automation. 

The funds come from two separate rounds – a pre-seed and a seed. Donut Labs previously announced its $7 million pre-seed round on X in May, just after the company launched, so we can assume that it raised $15 million from the latest seed round. 

The two rounds saw participation from a host of well-known investors in the crypto community, including Bitkraft, Makers Fund, HSG, Sky Capital, MPCi, Altos Ventures and Hack VC. The rounds also saw contributions from major crypto projects including Solana, Sui and Monad, as well as individual investments from the teams behind Jupiter, Drift and others. 

Clearly, Donut Labs is getting a lot of attention from the crypto community, and it’s not really a surprise given the extent of its ambitions. The startup is currently putting the finishing touches to Donut Browser, which is described as a highly specialized artificial intelligence-native web browser that’s built specifically for DeFi trading. 

Donut and its backers see an urgent need for agentic automation in the DeFi industry. In the last couple of years, DeFi trading has been booming, with a dramatic increase in the number of decentralized applications, and on-chain perpetuals surpassing the $1 trillion in monthly trading volume milestone in September. That’s about three-times higher than it was just a few years ago. 

Donut says this growth signals a decisive shift away from centralized exchanges towards on-chain trading. But decentralized trading still suffers from numerous structural risks, with uneven information quality, sophisticated market makers dominating retail flow and ad-hoc trading patterns limiting trader’s profits. 

Donut Browser supports multi-model orchestration, meaning it can coordinate multiple DeFi agents that have been fine-tuned for liquidity routing, planning and execution. It also features a real-time critic loop – a kind of feedback mechanism that allows traders to continuously analyze their trading actions and outcomes to improve their strategies. Other features include on-chain grounded prompt benchmarks and an API-based data and audit stack. 

The browser itself is based on a Chromium core, and can be accessed via the web or mobile, or alternatively via a Chrome extension. 

Zhu said that most of Donut’s team have been building AI solutions for years, and that’s where their primary expertise lies. They later fell in love with crypto, and it wasn’t long afterwards that they realized AI had the potential to dramatically improve the fortunes of many traders. After raising its initial pre-seed round, Donut Browser saw more than 160,000 signups for its waitlist in just three months, prompting the team to secure additional funding to accelerate its development. The money will be used to accelerate its launch and develop mechanisms for the company to monetize Donut Browser while enabling better outcomes for its users. 

Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.